Fact Check: Unrelated images shared as pro-Palestinians burning donkey with Israeli flag painted on its back

Hyderabad: A collage of two images is being shared on social media with users suggesting that pro-Palestinian protestors painted the Israeli flag on a donkey and killed the animal by burning it.

An X premium user shared the image with the caption, “The pro-Palestinian protesters against Israel prove how barbaric they are through their demonstrations!”

Several social media users have shared the image claiming the same. Click here and here to view the posts.

Fact Check

NewsMeter found that the first image in the collage is from 2011, and the second one is from 2014. Both are unrelated.

On performing a reverse image search, we found the first photo of the donkey with the Israeli flag painted on its back from the photo stock website Getty Images, published on September 23, 2011.

According to the caption, the donkey was painted by Palestinians during a demonstration to support the Palestinian bid at the United Nations for statehood recognition on September 23, 2011, in the West Bank village of Kfar Kadum.

Another image from the same event on Alamy showed a person riding the same donkey with the Palestinian flag.

“Palestinians display a donkey painted as an Israeli flag during a demonstration to support the Palestinian bid at the United Nations for statehood,” read the caption.

The reverse image of the second photo of the donkey being burnt directed us to a photo published by Getty Images on August 6, 2014.

The caption stated that the image shows Palestinians burning the donkey killed earlier by an Israeli air strike in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on August 6, 2014.

Hence, we conclude that two old and unrelated images are being shared as recent visuals amidst the Israel-Hamas conflict.